Walls of Discouragement

A few months back, I broke the stationary pedaling machine.  I was pretty devastated, as I tend to be whenever I break things, but my roommate just shrugged it off and bought another one. A few days later, noting my hesitation, he asked if I was still upset about breaking it. Of course I was. He reminded me that we'd had it for over a year and that it wasn't that expensive of an item. I felt better about it and resumed my activities.

Last week, the new one broke. It broke in the same place as the last one. This, as you will note, is only a few months after the break of the last one. It's also about the same amount of time that I, personally, was using the thing. Sure, we'd had it for over a year, but I wasn't using it for all of that time. Given that, it looked like the pedal machine was only going to last me about two months. This makes replacing it far more expensive.

This was emotionally rough on me. I had to make a decision to give up the pedaling because I just can't afford to keep replacing it that often.  I panicked about this for a while and then just got really depressed. Even though there are alternatives and I've come up with some plans for ways to move around it, it frustrated me. I felt defeated by the whole mess.

This post is hard to write. I'm sure if I had a lot of followers, this post would go viral and people would snicker about that fat woman who breaks work out equipment. It's actually embarrassing to write this and I feel a bit naked in doing so. I gave this a lot of thought and had mostly backed out of even mentioning it.

Why did I change my mind? I think it's for the same reason I blog about the pain I feel as my body is changing due to workouts. When you start losing weight at the size I was, or even at the size I am now, you think the hardest part is going to be sticking to plan. Commitment is hard and by the time you're in your 400-500s, you've started and failed workout programs a lot.

Commitment is only part of the difficulty though. The world just really isn't set up for people as fat as me to lose weight. Equipment is a big problem. Most of it isn't designed to handle people past a certain weight and it will break if you use it. When it breaks, it's very discouraging. And as much as commitment can be hard in this process, feeling like the world is actively discouraging you is even worse.

I'm sure everyone handles this differently. In the past, even I handled it differently. I used to hit walls of discouragement like this and let that end things. It just felt emotionally too difficult to continue. I would break something or someone would say something or the workout would cause too much pain or make me physically ill and I would just stop. And if I'm being really honest here, part of me was always happy when I stopped. I'm not even sure why.

These days, I'm trying a new approach with the discouragement. I give it a couple of days. I let myself be hurt about the situation. Then, I start trying to see if there are ways around it. Sometimes there aren't. Other times, there are. Hell, most of the times there are, it's just a matter of being brave about what you can manage to do with your body.

Even though more and more people are obese now, the world hasn't caught up with this. The world is still designed for people with average body types and that likely isn't going to change. As always, the fat people of the world need to find ways to adapt to this. It can be discouraging and frustrating, but it is what we have to work with. We can let it defeat us . . . or we can let it defeat us for a while, and then move forward with our plans.